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The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




Alice lifted her head.

"I could go away with her," she said, imploringly. "I could watch over
her day and night. But let me put this thing straight now publicly.
Indeed--indeed, it is time."

"You mean you wish to bring an action? In that case you would have to
return to give evidence."

"Yes--for a short time. But that could be managed. She should never see
the English papers--I could promise that."

"And what is to prevent Philip Meryon telling her? At present he is
entirely ignorant of her parentage. I have convinced myself of that this
morning. He has no dealings with the people here, nor they with him.
What has been happening here has not reached him. And he is really off
to-night. We must, of course, always take the risk of his knowing, and of
his telling her. A libel action would convert that risk into a certainty.
Would it not simply forward whatever designs he may have on her--for I do
not believe for a moment he will abandon them--it will be a duel, rather,
between him and us--would it not actually forward his designs--to tell
her?"

Alice did not reply. She sat wringing her delicate hands in a silent
desperation; while Catharine opposite was lost in the bewilderment of the
situation--the insistence of the woman, the refusal of the man.

"My advice is this"--continued Meynell, still addressing Alice--"that you
should take her to Paris tomorrow in my stead, and should stay near her
for some months. Lady Fox-Wilton--whom I have just seen--she overtook me
driving on the Markborough road half an hour ago, and we had some
conversation--talks of taking a house at Tours for a year--an excellent
thing--for them all. We don't want her on the spot any longer--we don't
want any of them!" said the Rector, dismissing the Fox-Wilton family with
an emphatic gesture which probably represented what he had gone through
in the interview with Edith. ... "In that way the thing will soon die
down. There will be nobody here--nobody within reach--for the scoundrel
who is writing these letters to attack--except, of course, myself--and
I shall know how to deal with it. He will probably tire of the amusement.
Other people will be ashamed of having read the letters and believed
them. I even dare to hope that Mr. Barron--in time--may be ashamed."

Alice looked at him in tremulous despair.

"Nobody to attack!" she said--"nobody to attack! And you,
Richard--_you_?"

A dry smile flickered on his face.

"Leave that to me--I assure you you may leave it to me."

"Richard!" said Alice imploringly--"just think. I know what you say is
very important--very true. But for me personally"--she looked round the
room with wandering eyes; then found a sudden passionate gesture,
pressing back the hair from her brow with both hands--"for me
personally--to tell the truth--to face the truth--would be
relief--infinite relief! It would kill the fear in which I have lived all
these years--kill it forever. It would be better for all of us if we had
told the truth--from the beginning. And as for Hester--she must know--you
say yourself she must know before long--when she is of age--when she
marries--"

Meynell's face took an unconscious hardness.

"Forgive me!--the matter must be left to me. The only person who could
reasonably take legal action would be myself--and I shall not take it. I
beg you, be advised by me." He bent forward again. "My dear friend!"--and
now he spoke with emotion--"in your generous consideration for me you do
not know what you are proposing--what an action in the courts would mean,
especially at this moment. Think of the party spirit that would be
brought into it--the venom--the prejudice--the base insinuations.
No!--believe me--that is out of the question--for your sake--and
Hester's."

"And your work--your influence?"

"If they suffer--they must suffer. But do not imagine that I shall not
defend myself--and you--you above all--from calumny and lies. Of course I
shall--in my own way."

There was silence--a dismal silence. At the end of it Meynell stretched
out his hand to Alice with a smile. She placed her own in it, slowly,
with a look which filled Catharine's eyes once more with tears.

"Trust me!" said Meynell, as he pressed the hand. "Indeed you may." Then
he turned to Catharine Elsmere--

"I think Mrs. Elsmere is with me--that she approves?"

"With one reservation." The words came gravely, after a moment's doubt.

His eyes asked her to be frank.

"I think it would be possible--I think it would be just--if Miss
Puttenham were to empower you to go to your Bishop. He too has rights!"
said Catharine, her clear skin reddening.

Meynell paused: then spoke with hesitation.

"Yes--that I possibly might do--if you permit me?" He turned again to
Alice.

"Go to him--go to him at once!" she said with a sob she could not
repress.

Another silence. Then Meynell walked to the window and looked at the
weather.

"It is not raining so fast," he said in his cheerful voice. "Oughtn't you
to be going home--getting ready and arranging with Hester? It's an awful
business going abroad."

Alice rose silently. Catharine went into the kitchen to fetch the
waterproof which had been drying.

Alice and Meynell were left alone.

She looked up.

"It is so hard to be hated!" she said passionately--"to see you hated. It
seems to burn one's heart--the coarse and horrible things that are being
said--"

He frowned and fidgeted--till the thought within forced its way:

"Christ was hated. Yet directly the least touch of it comes to us, we
rebel--we cry out against God."

"It is because we are so weak--we are not Christ!" She covered her face
with her hands.

"No--but we are his followers--if the Life that was in him is in us too.
'_Life that in me has rest_--_as I_--_Undying Life_--_have power in
Thee_!'" He fell--murmuring--into lines that had evidently been in his
thoughts, smiling upon her.

Then Catharine returned. Alice was warmly wrapped up, and Catharine took
her to the door, leaving Meynell in the sitting-room.

"We will come and help you this evening--Mary and I," she said tenderly,
as they stood together in the little passage.

"Mary?" Alice looked at her in a trembling uncertainty.

"Mary--of course."

Alice thought a moment, and then said with a low intensity, a force to
which Catharine had no clue--"I want you--to tell her--the whole story.
Will you?"

Catharine kissed her cheek in silence, and they parted.

* * * * *

Catharine went slowly back to the little sitting-room. Meynell was
standing abstracted before the fire, his hands clasped in front of him,
his head bent. Catharine approached him--drawing quick breath.

"Mr. Meynell--what shall I do--what do you wish me to do or say--with
regard to my daughter?"

He turned--pale with amazement.

And so began what one may call--perhaps--the most romantic action of a
noble life!




CHAPTER XVII


When Catharine returned to the little sitting-room, in which the darkness
of a rainy October evening was already declaring itself, she came shaken
by many emotions in which only one thing was clear--that the man before
her was a good man in distress, and that her daughter loved him.

If she had been of the true bigot stuff she would have seen in the
threatened scandal a means of freeing Mary from an undesirable
attachment. But just as in her married life, her heart had not been able
to stand against her husband while her mind condemned him, so now. While
in theory, and toward people with whom she never came in contact, she had
grown even more bitter and intransigent since Robert's death than she had
been in her youth, she had all the time been living the daily life of
service and compassion which--unknown to herself--had been the real
saving and determining force. Impulses of love, impulses of sacrifice
toward the miserable, the vile, and the helpless--day by day she had felt
them, day by day she had obeyed them. And thus all the arteries, so to
speak, of the spiritual life had remained soft and pliant--that life
itself in her was still young. It was there in truth that her
Christianity lay; while she imagined it to lie in the assent to certain
historical and dogmatic statements. And so strong was this inward and
vital faith--so strengthened in fact by mere living--that when she was
faced with this second crisis in her life, brought actually to close
grips with it, that faith, against all that might have been expected,
carried her through the difficult place with even greater sureness than
at first. She suffered indeed. It seemed to her all through that she was
endangering Mary, and condoning a betrayal of her Lord. And yet she could
not act upon this belief. She must needs act--with pain often, and yet
with mysterious moments of certainty and joy, on quite another faith, the
faith which has expressed itself in the perennial cry of Christianity:
"Little children, love one another!" And therein lay the difference
between her and Barron.

It was therefore in this mixed--and yet single--mood that she came back
to Meynell, and asked him--quietly--the strange question: "What shall I
do--what do you wish me to do or say--with regard to my daughter?"

Meynell could not for a moment believe that he had heard aright. He
stared at her in bewilderment, at first pale, and then in a sudden heat
and vivacity of colour.

"I--I hardly understand you, Mrs. Elsmere."

They stood facing each other in silence.

"Surely we need not inform her," he said, at last, in a low voice.

"Only that a wicked and untrue story has been circulated--that you
cannot, for good reasons, involving other persons, prosecute those
responsible for it in the usual way. And if she comes across any signs of
it, or its effects, she is to trust your wisdom in dealing with it--and
not to be troubled--is not that what you would like me to say?"

"That is indeed what I should like you to say." He raised his eyes to her
gravely.

"Or--will you say it yourself?"

He started.

"Mrs. Elsmere!"--he spoke with quick emotion--"You are wonderfully good
to me." He scanned her with an unsteady face--then made an agitated step
toward her. "It almost makes me think--you permit me--"

"No--no," said Catharine, hurriedly, drawing back. "But if you would like
to speak to Mary--she will be here directly."

"No!"--he said, after a moment, recovering his composure--"I couldn't!
But--will you?"

"If you wish it." Then she added, "She will of course never ask a
question; it will be her business to know nothing of the matter--in
itself. But she will be able to show you her confidence, and to feel that
we have treated her as a woman--not a child."'

Meynell drew a deep breath. He took Catharine's hand and pressed it. She
felt with a thrill--which was half bitterness--that it was already a
son's look he turned upon her.

"You--you have guessed me?" he said, almost inaudibly.

"I see there is a great friendship between you."

"_Friendship!_" Then he restrained himself sharply. "But I ought not to
speak of it--to intrude myself and my affairs on her notice at all at
this moment...." He looked at his companion almost sternly. "Is it not
clear that I ought not? I meant to have brought her a book to-day. I have
not brought it. I have been even glad--thankful--to think you were going
away, although--" But again he checked the personal note. "The truth is I
could not endure that through me--through anything connected with me--she
might be driven upon facts and sorrows--ugly facts that would distress
her, and sorrows for which she is too young. It seemed to me indeed I
might not be able to help it. But at the same time it was clear to me,
to-day, that at such a time--feeling as I do--I ought not in the smallest
degree to presume upon her--and your--kindness to me. Above all"--his
voice shook--"I could not come forward--I could not speak to her--as at
another time I might have spoken. I could not run the smallest risk--of
her name being coupled with mine--when my character was being seriously
called in question. It would not have been right for her; it would not
have been seemly for myself. So what was there--but silence? And yet I
felt--that through this silence--we should somehow trust each other!"

He paused a moment, looking down upon his companion. Catharine was
sitting by the fire near a small table on which her elbow rested, her
face propped on her hand. There was something in the ascetic refinement,
the grave sweetness of her aspect, that played upon him with a tonic and
consoling force. He remembered the frozen reception she had given him at
their first meeting; and the melting of her heart toward him seemed a
wonderful thing. And then came the delicious thought--"Would she so treat
him, unless Mary--_Mary_!--"

But, at the same time, there was in him the mind of the practical man,
which plainly and energetically disapproved her. And presently he tried,
with much difficulty, to tell her so, to impress upon her--upon her,
Mary's mother--that Mary must not be allowed to hold any communication
with him, to show any kindness toward him, till this cloud had wholly
cleared away, and the sky was clear again. He became almost angry as he
urged this; so excited, indeed, and incoherent that a charming smile
stole into Catharine's gray eyes.

"I understand quite what you feel," she said as she rose, "and why you
feel it. But I am not bound to follow your advice--or to agree with
you--am I?"

"Yes, I think you are," he said stoutly.

Then a shadow fell over her face.

"I suppose I am doing a strange thing"--her manner faltered a
little--"but it seems to me right--I have been _led_--else why was
it so plain?"

She raised her clear eyes, and he understood that she spoke of those
"hints" and "voices" of the soul that play so large a part in the more
mystical Christian experience. She hurried on:

"When two people--two people like you and Mary--feel such a deep
interest in each other--surely it is God's sign." Then, suddenly, the
tears shone. "Oh, Mr. Meynell!--trial brings us nearer to our Saviour.
Perhaps--through it--you and Mary--will find Him!"

He saw that she was trembling from head to foot; and his own emotion was
great.

He took her hand again, and held it in both his own.

"Do you imagine," he said huskily "that you and I are very far apart?"

And again the tenderness of his manner was a son's tenderness.

She shook her head, but she could not speak. She gently withdrew her
hand, and turned aside to gather up some letters on the table.

A sound of footsteps could be heard outside. Catharine moved to the
window.

"It is Mary," she said quietly. "Will you wait a little while I meet
her?" And without giving him time to reply, she left the room.

He walked up and down, not without some humorous bewilderment in spite of
his emotion. The saints, it seemed, are persons of determination! But,
after a minute, he thought of nothing, realized nothing, save that Mary
was in the little house again, and that one of those low voices he could
just hear, as a murmur in the distance, through the thin walls of the
cottage, was hers.

The door opened softly, and she came in. Though she had taken off her
hat, she still wore her blue cloak of Irish frieze, which fell round her
slender figure in long folds. Her face was rosy with rain and wind; the
same wind and rain which had stamped such a gray fatigue on Alice
Puttenham's cheeks. Amid the dusk, the fire-light touched her hair and
her ungloved hand. She was a vision of youth and soft life; and her
composure, her slight, shy smile, would alone have made her beautiful.

Their hands met as she gently greeted him. But there was that in his look
which disturbed her gentleness--which deepened her colour. She hurried to
speak.

"I am so glad that mother made you stay--just that I might tell
you." Then her breath began to hasten. "Mother says you are--or may
be--unjustly attacked--that you don't think it right to defend yourself
publicly--and those who follow you, and admire you, may be hurt and
troubled. I wanted to say--and mother approves--that whoever is hurt and
troubled, I can never be--except for you. Besides, I shall know and ask
nothing. You may be sure of that. And people will not dare to speak to
me."

She stood proudly erect.

Meynell was silent for a moment. Then, by a sudden movement, he stooped
and kissed a fold of her cloak. She drew back with a little stifled cry,
putting out her hands, which he caught. He kissed them both, dropped
them, and walked away from her.

When he returned it was with another aspect.

"Don't let's make too much of this trouble. It may all die away--or it
may be a hard fight. But whatever happens, you are going to Westmoreland
immediately. That is my great comfort."

"Is it?" She laughed unsteadily.

He too smiled. There was intoxication he could not resist--in her
presence--and in what it implied.

"It is the best possible thing that could be done. Then--whatever
happens--I shall not be compromising my friends. For a while--there must
be no communication between them and me."

"Oh, yes!" she said, involuntarily clasping her hands. "Friends may
write."

"May they?" He thought it over, with a furrowed brow, then raised it,
clear. "What shall they write about?"

An exquisite joyousness trembled in her look.

"Leave it to them!"

Then, as she once more perceived the anxiety and despondency in him,
the brightness clouded; pity possessed her: "Tell me what you are
preaching--and writing."

"_If_ I preach--_if_ I write. And what will you tell me?"

"'How the water comes down at Lodore,'" she said gayly. "What the
mountains look like, and how many rainy days there are in a week."

"Excellent! I perceive you mean to libel the country I love!"

"You can always come and see!" she said, with a shy courage.

He shook his head.

"No. My Westmoreland holiday is given up."

"Because of the Movement?"

And sitting down by the fire, still with that same look of suppressed and
tremulous joy, she began to question him about the meetings and
engagements ahead. But he would not be drawn into any talk about them. It
was no doubt quite possible--though not, he thought, probable--that he
might soon be ostracized from them all. But upon this he would not dwell,
and though her understanding of the whole position was far too vague
to warn her from these questions, she soon perceived that he was
unwilling to answer them as usual. Silence indeed fell between them; but
it was a silence of emotion. She had thrown off her cloak, and sat
looking down, in the light of the fire; she knew that he observed her,
and the colour on her cheek was due to something more than the flame at
her feet. As they realized each other's nearness indeed, in the quiet of
the dim room, it was with a magic sense of transformation. Outside the
autumn storm was still beating--symbol of the moral storm which
threatened them. Yet within were trust and passionate gratitude and
tender hope, intertwined, all of them, with the sacred impulse of the
woman toward the man, and of the man toward the woman. Each moment as it
passed built up one of those watersheds of life from which henceforward
the rivers flow broadening to undreamt-of seas.

* * * * *

When Catharine returned, Meynell was hat in hand for departure. There was
no more expression of feeling or reference to grave affairs. They stood a
few moments chatting about ordinary things. Incidentally Hugh Flaxman's
loss of the two gold coins was mentioned. Meynell inquired when they were
first missed.

"That very evening," said Mary. "Rose always puts them away herself. She
missed the two little cases at once. One was a coin of Velia, with a head
of Athene--"

"I remember it perfectly," said Meynell. "It dropped on the floor when I
was talking to Norham--and I picked it up--with another, if I remember
right--a Hermes!"

Mary replied that the Hermes too was missing--that both were exceedingly
rare; and that in the spring a buyer for the Louvre had offered Hugh four
hundred pounds for the two.

"They feel most unhappy and uncomfortable about it. None of the servants
seems to have gone into that room during the party. Rose put all the
coins on the table herself. She remembers saying good-bye to Canon France
and his sister in the drawing-room--and two or three others--and
immediately afterward she went into the green drawing-room to lock up the
coins. There were two missing."

"She doesn't remember who had been in the room?"

"She vaguely remembers seeing two or three people go in and out--the
Bishop!--Canon Dornal!"

They both laughed. Then Meynell's face set sharply. A sudden recollection
shot through his mind. He beheld the figure of a sallow, dark-haired
young man slipping--alone--through the doorway of the green drawing-room.
And this image in the mind touched and fired others, like a spark running
through dead leaves....

* * * * *

When he had gone, Catharine turned to Mary, and Mary, running, wound her
arms close round her mother, and lay her head on Catharine's breast.

"You angel!--you darling!" she said, and raising her mother's hand she
kissed it passionately.

Catharine's eyes filled with tears, and her heart with mingled joy and
revolt. Then, quickly, she asked herself as she stood there in her
child's embrace whether she should speak of a certain event--certain
experience--which had, in truth, though Mary knew nothing of it, vitally
affected both their lives.

But she could not bring herself to speak of it.

So that Mary never knew to what, in truth, she owed the painful breaking
down of an opposition and a hostility which might in time have poisoned
all their relations to each other.

But when Mary had gone away to change her damp clothes, the visionary
experience of which Catharine could not tell came back upon her; and
again she felt the thrill--the touch of bodiless ecstasy.

It had been in the early morning, when all such things befall. For then
the mind is not yet recaptured by life and no longer held by sleep. There
is in it a pure expectancy, open to strange influences: influences from
memory and the under-soul. It visualizes easily, and dream and fact are
one.

In this state Catharine woke on a September morning and felt beside her a
presence that held her breathless. The half-remembered images and
thoughts of sleep pursued her--became what we call "real."

"Robert!" she said, aloud--very low.

And without voice, it seemed to her that some one replied. A dialogue
began into which she threw her soul. Of her body, she was not conscious;
and yet the little room, its white ceiling, its open windows, and the
dancing shadows of the autumn leaves were all present to her. She poured
out the sorrow, the anxiety--about Mary--that pressed so heavy on her
heart, and the tender voice answered, now consoling, now rebuking.

"And we forbade him, because he followed not us ... Forbid him
not--_forbid him not_!"--seemed to go echoing through the quiet air.

The words sank deep into her sense--she heard herself sobbing--and
the unearthly presence came nearer--though still always remote,
intangible--with the same baffling distance between itself and her....

The psychology of it was plain. It was the upthrust into consciousness of
the mingled ideas and passions on which her life was founded, piercing
through the intellectualism of her dogmatic belief. But though she would
have patiently accepted any scientific explanation, she believed in her
heart that Robert had spoken to her, bidding her renounce her repugnance
to Mary's friendship with Meynell--to Mary's love for Meynell.

She came down the morning after with a strange, dull sense of change
and disaster. But the currents of her mind and will had set firmly in a
fresh direction. It was almost mechanically--under a strong sense of
guidance--that she had made her hesitating proposal to Mary to go with
her to the Upcote meeting. Mary's look of utter astonishment had sent new
waves of disturbance and compunction through the mother's mind.

* * * * *

But if these things could not be told--even to Mary--there were other
revelations to make.

When the lamp had been brought in, and the darkness outside shut out,
Catharine laid her hand on Mary's, and told the story of Alice Puttenham.

Mary heard it in silence, growing very pale. Then, with another embrace
of her mother, she went away upstairs, only pausing at the door of the
sitting-room to ask when they should start for the cottage.

Upstairs Mary sat for long in the dark, thinking.... Through her
uncurtained windows she watched the obscure dying away of the storm, the
calming of the trees, and the gradual clearing of the night sky. Between
the upfurling clouds the stars began to show; tumult passed into a great
tranquillity; and a breath of frost began to steal through the woods, and
over the water....

Catharine too passed an hour of reflection--and of yearning over the
unhappy. Naturally, to Mary, her lips had been sealed on that deepest
secret of all, which she had divined for a moment in Alice. She had
clearly perceived what was or had been the weakness of the woman,
together with the loyal unconsciousness and integrity of the man. And
having perceived it, not only pity but the strain in Catharine of plain
simplicity and common sense bade her bury and ignore it henceforward.
It was what Alice's true mind must desire; and it was the only way to
help her. She began however to understand what might be the full meaning
of Alice's last injunction--and her eyes grew wet.

Site of the Week: The International Literary Quarterly

An intricate, kaleidoscopic, all-embracing history of 20th-century music from Mahler to La Monte Young is the winner of this year's Guardian first book award. Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise was the clear and undisputed winner of the £10,000 prize, which has been presented at a ceremony in central London tonight.

The chair of the judging panel, Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead, said: "In some quarters this book has been seen as not having a popular appeal. Our prize – which, uniquely, relies on readers' groups in the early stages of judging – proves that, on the contrary, there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books."

According to one judge: "Where Ross lifts his book above the 'expert' and impressive to the 'good read' category is in the way he wears his learning lightly, never clutches for false or contrived ways of explaining music, and never dumbs down in order to explain."

One of the members of the Waterstone's reading groups, who helped in the judging process, said: "Every time I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose."

Ross, who is the music critic of the New Yorker, has distilled a lifetime's enthusiasm and learning into a rich narrative of musical history, setting the works of Mahler, Schoenberg, John Cage and the rest into their cultural and political contexts – but also giving a vivid sense of what the music he describes actually sounds and feels like.

Of all the artforms, modern and contemporary classical music is often seen as the most rebarbative. Ross brushes aside the mythology of 20th-century music's "inaccessibility" as he charts its meandering histories. Along the way, fascinating connections are made: hip-hop has more in common with Janacek than you might think; Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners; Gershwin, in turn, was an ardent fan of Alban Berg and kept an autographed photo of the composer of Lulu in his apartment. If there is an overarching idea to the book, it is perhaps contained in Berg's pronouncement to Gershwin: "Mr Gershwin, music is music."

Ross, 40, was born in Washington DC, and studied English and history at Harvard. An enthusiastic teenage musician and student broadcaster, he began writing music criticism after university and in 1996 was appointed music critic of the New Yorker. His blog – also called The Rest Is Noise – has been a trailblazer in harnessing the internet as a way of amplifying (often literally) his writing on music.

The New York Review of Books described The Rest Is Noise as "by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music". The Economist noted: "No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."

Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican and a former Observer music critic, said: "At a time when people are still talking about 20th-century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book about what I regard as some of the greatest music ever written. It's a wonderful way to advance the cause of 20th-century music to an ordinary, intelligent general reader. It's the ideal mix of enthusiasm and information."

This year's judging panel comprised novelist Roddy Doyle; broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock; poet Daljit Nagra; the historian David Kynaston; novelist Kate Mosse and Guardian deputy editor, Katharine Viner. Stuart Broom of Waterstone's also joined the deliberations, speaking as the representative of the readers' groups.

The other books on the shortlist were Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole (which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize) and Owen Matthews's Stalin's Children.

Previous winners of the prize have included Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).

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